Introduction

Many scholars in the fields of art history and art criticism, even after the debates of the last decades, see the value of applying a psychoanalytic viewpoint to certain problems involving not only individual but group psychology and not only living artists but ones long dead. One still hopes to combine the fields in such a way as to produce new perspectives and insights into the materials unavailable to either approach separately. Naturally, old problems remain (manifest in numerous failed efforts at “psychohistory”) of integrating psychoanalytic insights into history without reducing the richness and complexity of historical situations to psychological elements and without simplistically projecting the results derived from the behavior of individuals to social groups. Frequently both problems have originated from the uninformed ambition of specialists exploring unfamiliar materials. The contributors to this issue have both a specialized knowledge of an area of art history, and a good acquaintance with psychoanalytic writings relevant to their subject. Their studies of materials unlikely to be familiar to a psychoanalytic audience have a degree of clarity and freshness that will, I hope, expand the horizons of the readership of American Imago.

When, at the beginning of this century, the “Founding Fathers” of psychoanalysis analyzed art they did so as a meta-psychological avocation from their clinical practice. They devoted their attention to the most famous (often Italian High Renaissance) masters; everything else they either ignored as uninteresting mediocrity or studied as the protocol of a psychopathological condition. In recent decades both the nature of the critics and their subject matter have changed dramatically in the U.S.: comparatively few of the psychoanalytic critics maintain clinical practices; and, following the examples set by minority and feminist critics, they have paid increasing attention to non-canonical art, art that falls outside